Twev1701.net 2002-2012 » g33k stuff

Simpler Was Better

Trev — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:24:24 +0000

I don’t know why but I have been thinking about web services that have gone the way of the dinosaur lately. Of all the web services that have come and gone, the one I miss the most is TextAmerica. What was TextAmerica? It was a photo sharing site. More specifically, it was a moblog hosting site. It was simple, it was sleek, and it did its job just fine.

TextAmerica was a place where you could just upload photos from your phone via email and it would simply display a thumbnail with the title. That’s it. No tags, no location data, no sets — just your pic and a title. It not only made uploading pics easy, but it made it addictive as well.

I have been a Pro member of Flickr since 2006. I have over 3,000 photos on that site. And yet lately, I haven’t been uploading pics because I just don’t feel like going through the hassle. The method of uploading has been relatively unchanged since 2006. That’s a royal pain the in the ass. I want a system like TextAmerica where it’s simple and works beautifully.

I downloaded the desktop version of Picasa tonight with the thoughts of maybe moving onto that platform to post my pictures. I’ll play around with it more tomorrow night. I could go back to Buzznet, the very first service I used for a moblog back in March of 2004, but that really seems extreme considering I left them because they really started to suck. I just logged back into my account over there and they’re not much better then they were when I left in 2005.

I am off on Wednesday and Thursday. I think I may have to devote some geek time and investigate this issue further. Either way, I have a feel this was the last year I pay $25 to be a Flickr Pro member.

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Leaving A World Behind

Trev — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 05:40:01 +0000

I did something a few weeks ago I never meant to. Looking back, I’m glad I did.

Anyone who really knows me knows that everyday I ‘do my rounds’ on the computer. This involves me going to a handful of sites and reading their new daily content. This list can be broken down into 4 major categories — web comics, news, social media, and tech sites. Reading all of these sites usually takes me a good hour or so. To be honest, it’s time consuming and was getting to be a real pain in the ass. So, a few weeks ago I stopped. Cold turkey. To be honest, I don’t miss it.

I have been reading web comics for over 10 years, and I surprisingly don’t miss reading them.

When I would digest my dozen or so tech site’s information, I felt like my brain was going to explode. No more of that.

I still check social media and news sites, but I limit those sites to 2 a day. I check notional & local news, and Twitter & Facebook for my social needs. What used to take me an hour typically takes me about 10-15 minutes now. The best part? I really don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. Kinda makes you wonder how many hours I wasted in the past 10 years reading garbage. Weird, eh?

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Wired

Trev — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 04:58:23 +0000

So I had a totally geektastic day yesterday.

It all started in the morning when Jess and Jackson left for their weekly reading group at our local library. Once they left I took a shower and was trying to decide what project to tackle for the day. Initially, I was going to clean the bedroom and stow the laminate under the bed. Once I got dressed and walked out into the kitchen, I decided to change my mind. Instead, I decided to unhook all of my network gear and move it to the basement.

You see, all of the networking equipment still resided in Jack’s room, since the whole house was originally wired to have my computer room (now his bedroom) as the house’s central nexus. Given that we are moving Jess’s desk upstairs to my office, moving the network equipment made sense. Also, Jack has a nasty habit of turning the power off to the network when he’s mad at us. (no lie!)

After re-wiring everything in the basement, my horns when up. We recently reclaimed a large portion of our attic behind the walls for storage. In doing so, I got the idea that I might finally be able to run a hardline upstairs and not have to rely on the sketchy wireless signals anymore. After 20 minutes of crawling around the roofline on my stomach, I found an entrance point that was satisfactory. Within 30 minutes, the upstairs was hardwired onto my network. Success!!!

Once Jess and Jack came home, she got inspired and went to town cleaning the upstairs. In fact, she got so much moved that we were able to move her desk and computer completely upstairs. Jackson’s room is now 100% his. It’s also very nice to have my wife right next to my in my office now. It reminds me of the old days…

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Stepping Away

Trev — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 05:33:53 +0000

I had a friend ask me the other day to look at his computer. Apparently he has some nasty viruses on it and can’t seem to get them off. My first reaction was to of course tell him I would. But then after I said that, my brain finally kicked in. Why do I think I could get these viruses off? And even if I could, why should I?

I moved to a Mac almost 4 years ago to get away from shit like this. In fact, everything in my house right now ‘just works’. No big maintenance, no constant updating, no worrying over malware and viruses. I turn on my Apple TV and it works. Same things with our iPhones and my Mac. I love that.

I used to be a the kind of geek that would love the challenge of taking an infested system and making it just like new. Now I literally shudder at the thought of taking on a challenge like that. I’m past that stage in my life. I’m done. I am officially an end-user.

How do I feel about that. Two words come to mind: relieved and happy.

I am on my Mac for the first time in about a good 2 weeks. Guess what? It was just like I had left it. I did not have to update my antivirus, run a malware scan, or worry about a corrupted registry. The only thing I really had to do was refresh my browser from 2 weeks ago to get the latest Twitter and Facebook feeds. I love that.

I think it may be time to finally hang up my PC tech tool belt and walk away for good. The thought of walking into a store (more than likely an Apple Store) and buying a new computer excites 100 times more than trolling Newegg and compiling a list of parts to assemble a new machine.

Five years ago I would have been horrified by that thought. Today, it puts a big smile on my face.

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Steam and Gears

Trev — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 07:25:05 +0000

On a happy note, I finally broke down last week and purchased a book I have been looking at for literally months. I really had a hard time shelling out $35 on a book for myself, but when we got to Barnes & Noble on the night of our 5th Anniversary dinner, they had but 1 copy left. When I did a quick search online, I found that just about every retailer was sold out, and copies are going for literally hundreds of dollars!! Suddenly, $35 didn’t seen too bad. Add in Jess’s Barnes & Noble club card, and this bad boy was mine for $28. A steal!

This book as quickly become one of my favorite books, and I can see it will be something that I will be re-reading/looking through for years to come.

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I’m A Proud Father

Trev — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:58:02 +0000

I got to buy Jackson his first video game this afternoon.

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iTunes, We Need To Talk…

Trev — Wed, 25 May 2011 07:20:26 +0000

I have been legitimately buying music for over 3 years now, and when I am not purchasing a physical CD, I buy my music from iTunes. Why iTunes? A couple of reasons actually. First, it’s where I play all of my music and all my purchases are instantly added to my ever-growing library. Second, I can buy music from my iPhone from iTunes. Once the music downloads to my phone I can listen to it instantly and then easily transfer it to my Mac when I get home. Third, everyone always buys me iTunes gift cards for Holidays and my birthday. It’s a great gift and I always have credit there. Last but not least, I am an Apple fan-boy and it’s where Uncle Steve tells us to go when we want music.

That’s all changing after tonight.

About 2 months ago Amazon launched their Cloud Music PLayer. What it essentially is is a storage space in ‘the cloud for you to store music so that you can listen to it anywhere. You get 5gb for free and as long s as you buy 1 full album per year, you get an additional 15gb free. I wasn’t that interested in this service. True, I did buy an album to get the extra 15gb of storage, but I never used it. Oh, almost forgot. Every time you purchase music from Amazon’s MP3 store, it’s automatically added to you cloud storage and does not count against your storage capacity. Kinda nifty.

What does all of that have to do with me not buying music form iTunes? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I could care less about cloud music storage. What does interest me is what happened a few weeks later. Amazon launched a $.69 song store with top hits and a 500+ song catalog. I read about it, talked about it on the Growing Up Geek podcast, but never checked it out. That is, until tonight.

I was in the mood to get some new music. Not knowing what was ‘popular’ or ‘hip’, I headed over to iTunes. Not liking anything I saw on the top charts, I remembered that a friend posted a link about the new Lady Gaga album being $.99 on Amazon yesterday. I followed the link and found that it was 1 day only and that it was back up to $6.99. I was disappointed, but intrigued. This same album was $9.99 on iTunes. I then remembered about the $.69 song store. I headed over there and found either stuff I already owned or stuff I was not remotely interested in. Having lots of time to kill and still craving new music, I headed to Amazon’s main MP3 store to check out what it had to offer. This is where my outlook on iTunes changed dramatically. They have over 51,000 full albums under $4.99, and literally tens of thousands more under that quintessential $9.99 price point. After going through various categories for well over an hour, I ended up buying 3 singles (1 for $.69 and 2 for $.99) and a Fiction Plane album for $5.00. After I bought the Fiction Plane album, I was curious to see what iTunes had it listed for. The EXACT same album that I purchased on Amazon for $5 would have cost me $9.9 on iTunes. Plus as a bonus, a copy is now stored on the cloud for me if I ever need it AND I was able to download it DIRECTLY into my iTunes library.

Amazon, you just won my music business. Well played.

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An Interesting Observation

Trev — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 05:11:26 +0000

I notices something tonight that struck me as odd. My wide and I have turned into an Apple family. Tonight while I was upstairs on my Mac Mini, I grabbed my iPhone and my wife’s iPad, came downstairs, and set them near her iPod on the kitchen table. I walked into the living room, past out Apple TV, and am now in the bathroom typing out this post on my iPhone. Why is all of this odd? Fifteen years ago I was a diehard PC guy. Apple was stupid and good for nothing. Even though I used Apple computers exclusively throughout school, I was firmly a PC man. Then about 9 years ago I started to lust after a Macintosh. I bought my first one, a Macintosh Classic II off of eBay and loved every minute of it. Then I ousted after an iPod for years. Eventually I got one of those too. After that it was a Mac. Check. iPhone? Check. iPad? Check. As a family we now have 4 iPods, 2 iPhones, 2 Macs, 1 iPad, and 1 Apple TV. We are firmly an Apple family.

I never would have seen this coming.

Well Hello There The last 2 weeks have been rather amazing. I’ve been...

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Well Hello There

Trev — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 03:13:14 +0000

The last 2 weeks have been rather amazing. I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to even sit down to write a single post about any of it. In fact, I should be sleeping right now, but really want to sneak out at least one post before all of this gets too old to talk about. Where should we begin…

Growing Up Geek. Yes, this is a perfect place to start. Much to our surprise, on February 28, 2011, our little podcast, Growing Up Geek, was featured on the iTunes Podcast home page. In fact, it is still there this very minute. what has that meant for us? First, it means that we’re no longer an ‘unknown’ podcast. At the height of the rush, people we downloading an episode a minute from our servers. While things have dramatically slowed down, we’ve served almost half a terabyte, yes TERABYTE, of podcasts to people in the past 2 weeks. This has been incredible! The last time I can remember anything even close to this was back in September 2005 when we had an article published about i/o Computers on the /. website. We got calls for work from Los Angles and even a call from IBM curious if would like to be a local contractor for doing network estimates. It’s still crazy to think about that time. Now here we are 6 years later and we’re moving thousands of megabytes a day on a little podcast we do because we think it’s fun. It’s all pretty unbelievable!

On the tech side of things, I’ve finally started my project of simplifying everything. I have been searching for a simple way to have a unified streaming device for all of our media. I thought I had found it with PlayOn, but there have been some serious disappointments with that software. It’s just too damn unreliable. My dream was to one day find something that will stream our movies, music, pictures, and Netflix without having to do all kind of crazy configurations. I found such a device. It’s the new Apple TV. I picked one up last week, had it fully up and running in under 10 minutes, and have been loving the shit out of it ever since. This is single handedly my favorite tech device I have purchased in the last 12 months. It is simply amazing!! I highly recommend you pick one up if your looking for a unified streaming solution. So worth it!

Jess also ended up ordering an iPad 2. She woke up at 4am on launch day and ordered one on line rather then trying to wait in line for one with Jackson. we just got confirmation on Saturday that he iPad has been shipped and she should hopefully have it by the end of the week. This little device is going to make her life as a teacher so much easier. I’m really glad she picked one up.

On the family side of things, it’s been a trying few weeks. Jackson has been sick with a high fever that has only finally gone away today. To make matters worse, he has taken to throwing a temper tantrum every few minutes. I know it’s an age thing and it’s just a phase, but it’s a tough one to go through. He’s all happy and smiles one minutes, and then the next, he throws himself to the floor and starts screaming at the top of his lungs. We’ll get through this though.

That’s all the time I rally have right. I should have been asleep about a half hour ago. Oh well. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. Later…

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Set In My Ways

Trev — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 03:00:11 +0000

While I was making my last post about a great Doctor Who graphic I found, I had to stop and laugh at myself. WordPress has a great set of posting tools that allow you to effortlessly post images. Hell, you don’t even need an FTP program as it will automatically upload your image to your server.

So why did this make me laugh?

Because to this day I’m still old school. I still manually name and thumbnail all my images. I manually upload them to my server using a standalone FTP program (FileZilla for Windows, Cyberduck for OSX) and still manually put in the HTML to post said pictures. Even though the built in WordPress tools are indeed easier, I still prefer to write my own code manually so I know 100% how this picture will appear. It’s an old habit I doubt I will ever be broken of.

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